Why is it that the Biden admin is doing two years worth of governing in the last two weeks of their tenure?
Because the next administration is going to do 0 years of governing in 4.
Executive order on advancing United States leadership in AI infrastructure
61–70 of 113 posts
Re: Executive order on advancing United States leadership in AI infrastructure
#62It's interesting to see the federal government taking a strong industrial policy approach to AI through this executive order as well as physical computing via the CHIPS act. Couple concerns: - I loath to believe in silver bullets. The executive branch seems to believe that investing in AI (note: the order, despite the extensive definitions, leaves Artificial Intelligence undefined) is the solution to US global leader…
Is the U.S. responding to recent moves in the U.K. to make a national effort in this field (the U.S. does not want to be an also-ran)? Are they responding to the efforts in China? Do they know something more than we do with regard to the efficacy of current or soon-to-come AI? Or is it purely a speculative business/economic move?
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Re: Executive order on advancing United States leadership in AI infrastructure
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Provided all this centralized governement owned and run infra somehow gets built, what it would be actually doing to warrant the expense ? I am quite skeptical in this regard. :P
Well, it would funnel tax dollars to already-established companies that don't need the subsidies. :p I have some sympathy for certain domestic capabilities (e.g. chip fabrication) but this "AI" bubble cross-infecting government policy is frustrating to watch.
It's hard to know how much this effort is about the government's belief in AI, and how much of it is about supporting the technology sector while using AI as a convenient buzzword.
I think, though, that even if LLMs turn out to be a dead-end and don't progress much further... there are a lot of benefits here.
One of the US's key strategic advantages is brain drain.
We are one of the world's premier destinations for highly educated, highly skilled people from other countries. Their loss, our gain.
There are of course myriad other countries where they could go, many of them more attractive than the US in various ways. Every country in the world is in a sense competing for this talent.
Re: Executive order on advancing United States leadership in AI infrastructure
#64Picking a target makes that target already obsolete. I wonder if this is the beginning of the pop of the ai bubble
Re: Executive order on advancing United States leadership in AI infrastructure
#65Didn’t they release something just yesterday that was doing the opposite?
Re: Executive order on advancing United States leadership in AI infrastructure
#66Summary of the concrete actions: 1. Early 2025: Identify Federal sites for AI data centers, clean energy facilities, and geothermal zones. Streamline permitting processes and draft reporting requirements for AI infrastructure. Develop a plan for global collaboration on trusted AI infrastructure. 2. By Mid-2025: Issue solicitations for AI infrastructure projects on Federal sites. Select winning proposals and announce…
That schedule is impossible. Given the amount of power data centers take, and the fact that the government is new to building them, the environmental review process and lawsuits will take years.
The EO also has quite some provisions for fast tracking permits. The whole thing is worth a read
Re: Executive order on advancing United States leadership in AI infrastructure
#67The analysis of this EO in these comments is disappointing.
It contains a lot of good stuff, also on geothermal and nuclear; long term storage; improving power transmission infrastructure; attempting to address the impact of AI on electricity rates for regular consumers; improving data transparency and communications of interconnections; improving the permitting flow for critical (clean) infrastructure; and a bunch of other stuff.
The likelihood of it all surviving the incoming administration seem low, but given how it aligns with already present structural trends (and downright critically important needs in terms of power infrastructure at least), there's a good chance some parts will.
It's more an energy policy EO than an AI EO, and it's both ambitious and objectively positive for combating climate change. Maybe we could at least read the damn thing before filling the comments with low effort cynicism?
Re: Executive order on advancing United States leadership in AI infrastructure
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
That schedule is impossible. Given the amount of power data centers take, and the fact that the government is new to building them, the environmental review process and lawsuits will take years.
I agree in general, but equipment mainly due to lead times and not permit/etc times. Remember it's federal land, so they can't be held to state permitting or building codes, etc, only what they choose to (IE if their agency adopted it explicitly) Having seen lots of datacenters constructed over the years - it's tractable in terms of the bureaucracy parts if they want it to be - because they can mostly ignore them. So…
I’m not an environmental lawyer, but you don’t think these will be subject to NEPA? It sounds like they’re trying to piggy-back off land that was made available for solar projects under an existing EIS, but it sounds that those decisions could be litigated.
Re: Executive order on advancing United States leadership in AI infrastructure
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, it would funnel tax dollars to already-established companies that don't need the subsidies. :p I have some sympathy for certain domestic capabilities (e.g. chip fabrication) but this "AI" bubble cross-infecting government policy is frustrating to watch.
It's hard to know how much this effort is about the government's belief in AI, and how much of it is about supporting the technology sector while using AI as a convenient buzzword. I think, though, that even if LLMs turn out to be a dead-end and don't progress much further... there are a lot of benefits here. One of the US's key strategic advantages is brain drain. We are one of the world's premier destinations for h…
zero sum thinking has already infected public policy. turns out liberals can be just as "they took our jobs" as the redneck conservative.
the real fear should be that people wouldnt want to come. already chinese intl students are break even when considering US vs going back to china. who wants to deal with all the bureaucracy and hatred when they could just go back and work for deepseek.
Re: Executive order on advancing United States leadership in AI infrastructure
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect we are not in a race for a better LLM, but a race to the singularity. "I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of self-improvement cycles, each successive; and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence which would ultimately result in a powerful…
Is there any reason whatsoever that I should think that I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965 corresponds to reality?
When I step through the logic in my mind, seems likely.
Lets make the leap of faith that we can improve our AIs to actually understand code that it's reading and can suggest improvements. Current LLMs can't do it, but perhaps another approach can. I don't think this is a big leap. Might be 10 years, might be 100.
It's not unreasonable to think there is a lot of cruft and optimization to be had in our current tech stacks allowing for significant improvement. The AI can start looking at every source file from the lowest driver all the way up to the UI.
It can also start looking at hardware designs and build chips dedicated to the functions it needs to perform.
You only need to be as smart as a human to achieve this. You can rely on a "quantitative" approach because even human level AI brains don't need to sleep or eat or live. They just work on your problems 24/7 and can you have have as many as you can manufacture and power.
I think having "qualitatively" superiority is a little easier actually because with a large enough database the AI has perfect recall and all of the worlds data at its fingertips. No human can do that.